‘9 Meals Away From Disaster.’ Financial Advisors on How to Prepare for the Worst

By

Mike Zimmerman

Aug. 23, 2019 7:29 pm ET

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Call it tail risk or Murphy’s Law, but if history has taught us anything, something unexpected and unprecedented will come for us. In the past 100 years, we’ve seen Pearl Harbor and 9/11, a Great Depression and Recession, and lots and lots of war. Sure, we bounce back, but having a plan for the tough times makes them a lot easier to stomach.

What’s to come? New possibilities include cyberterrorism—potential attacks on our electrical grid, financial systems, or water supply. A dirty bomb could render a major city section like lower Manhattan uninhabitable for years. Then you have Mother Nature: hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and quieter disasters like drought.

Computers are the most obvious weapon, as Warren Buffett warned at Berkshire’s 2018 shareholder meeting, “Cyber is uncharted territory. It’s going to get worse, not better.”

But the scary, devastating stuff? The risk is real, even if it’s low. “Any black swan event could conceivably take the market from today’s P/E of 22 down to 10,” says Wally Obermeyer, president and co-chairman of Obermeyer Wood Investment Counsel. And in the worst-case scenarios, your portfolio will be the least of your concerns.

We asked advisors to high-net-worth investors what steps they’re advising that clients take just in case the black swan appears.

Get right about risk.

Everyone is “risk tolerant” in a bull market. But a disaster will reveal how you truly feel about risk. “If a new client doesn’t bring up potential disasters, I bring it up,” says Valerie L. Newell, principal and senior wealth advisor with Mariner Wealth Advisors. “How would they react if a bomb goes off and the markets drop 25%? It’s not just about planning. It gives me a really good idea of how that client feels about risk, deep down. That helps us define risk parameters and asset allocation.”

Even experienced investors are not immune to emotion. “I am constantly amazed how many clients of mine are wealthy, sophisticated people who have built and sold businesses, and old enough to have been through several market cycles, and will throw all that out the window when something scary happens,” says Spuds Powell, managing director of Kayne Anderson Rudnick Wealth Management. If you emotionally prepare for the bad times now, it’s easier to have a rational long-term perspective when it’s happening.

Obermeyer focuses on one word: “We tell clients we want them in a position that’s acceptable over a wide range of circumstances. To me, the word acceptable is important. You may not be in a happy or even OK situation, but it’s acceptable.”

How do you get there?

Build a moat of money.

The advisors we spoke to agree: have enough cash in the bank and a little closer at hand to cover at least two years of withdrawal needs. (Obermeyer prefers three.) Add a bond portfolio that will pay into your cash account during the bad times. “Everybody flocks to U.S. debt and currency in a crisis,” says Newell. “I suggest Treasuries and some good corporate or municipal bonds, laddered so that there’s always the cash they need dumping into the portfolio as long as the bonds pay out.”

The point: No matter how bad things get over the next few years, you won’t have to sell a single stock. “When we review that for clients,” says Newell, “you can see it in their eyes and body language. They feel safe.”

Be able to recreate your financial life later.

Financial firms spend big to ensure that your records are safe and reproducible. “Our firm’s budget for cybersecurity is ‘whatever it takes,’ ” says Richard B. Jones, managing director of the Jones Zafari Group at Merrill Lynch. That includes everyday security like email screening, backup systems in different locations, and (theoretically) unbreachable firewalls. Even then, no one can guarantee anything.

Back up your own files—tax returns, statements, wills, deeds—and keep copies in multiple locations (thumb drives and the cloud). If the digital world is disrupted, you can recreate your financial life.

Build a DIY earthquake kit.

Common sense says you should have a few days’ worth of food, water, and medical supplies for a potential disaster. The advisors we spoke to also suggest keeping $5,000 to $10,000 in $20, $50, and $100 bills, in case ATMs go down.

Obermeyer owns a Rocky Mountain home near Aspen, Colo., outfitted with a generator, propane heat, and a chicken coop, as well as an airplane he keeps gassed up. He’s no prepper, however. “This isn’t a lifestyle. This is more about business continuity. If something happens, I can stay up and running.” (That highlights another useful investment: land).

What he doesn’t stash? Physical assets like gold that project power but are useless in a crisis, he says. “Would you saw up a gold bar to buy a couple of apples? How do you prove it’s real gold?”

Tell your inner Mad Max to take a breath.

If things ever get so bad for so long that we experience a full societal breakdown and lose rule of law, our advisors agree that everything stated up to now would go out the window and you’d need only three important assets on hand: food, water, and guns.

If that sounds dire, just…

Draw out the timeline.

In any previous financial crisis, time has always been our greatest asset—and it will be again. Powell puts it in perspective: “Any time the stock market has gone through a downturn, it has always recovered and eventually set a new record high. Even post-9/11, which was historic, we recovered so well there wasn’t any medium or long-term impact on the markets. The average bear market lasts 1.3 years, and the average bull market lasts 8.9 years. That’s how I use facts, rather than the heat of the moment, to make decisions.”

Scope out the opportunity.

Perhaps it’s cold to suggest seeing disaster as a buying opportunity, but historically that’s what every down market has been. “Even the crash of 2008-09 was one of the great investment opportunities in our lifetime,” says Powell.

Obermeyer agrees, and that’s one reason he’s so adamant about establishing that multiyear liquidity in your portfolio. It’s not just a protection against disaster. “That dry powder can be used if things are irrationally down. After a lot of those black swan–type events, in five years you’re likely to be recovered.”

Refill your glass.

There are glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, but someone wise once said we forget that our glasses are refillable. Even if you’re not a fan of the U.S. government, it has always been there in some capacity after every disaster.

“We’ve always had at least a decent governmental response—Y2K prep, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, even Pearl Harbor,” says Newell. “If you believe in your heart there’s nothing that can be thrown at us that we can’t handle with the right resources—then we’ll be OK. That’s not just patriotic rah-rah stuff. The technical expertise in this country, the resources, the entrepreneurship—those things get us through these crises.”

What do you need in a disaster?

“If you prepare for an extended electrical outage, or ‘grid down’ situation, you’re basically prepared for virtually any disaster,” says Joel Smernoff, CEO of Black Umbrella, a New York firm specializing in emergency preparedness. Here’s his DIY advice:

Communication and reunification. How will you get the family back together in a crisis? Black Umbrella supplies clients with an etched metal “go card” that has the most important phone numbers in priority order, addresses of four meeting places in descending priority (starting with home), an out-of-town contact person who can field calls (“Long-distance phone service is generally the last to go down and first to be restored,” says Smernoff), and numbers for pediatricians, hospitals, and schools. Creating a do-it-yourself card for your family also guarantees that you’ll develop a plan in the first place.

Shelter-in-place kit. Native Americans had a “sacred order of survival,’” says Smernoff: shelter, water, fire, food. Your home is shelter, so you should have at least three days’ worth of water and food, and means to prepare meals (a small camp stove). You can add generators, gasoline, water filters, medications, first-aid supplies, or basic tools.

Don’t skimp on the food.“British MI5 has a saying,” says Smernoff: “’At any given time, we’re nine meals away from anarchy.’ ” In other words, disaster situations that last more than three days are the most risky for people running out of food and water—and that’s when people start to do bad things.

Go bag. This is a miniaturized version of your shelter-in-place kit. Shelter in this case is clothing: whatever you need for warmth and weather (like a poncho), then some compact food basics like protein bars, as well as medications, portable phone charger, and cash—all in a bag you can grab in 30 seconds.

Cash. Split your $5,000 to $10,000 between your go bag ($1,000) and a safe. If you don’t have time, you’ll have the go-bag cash, but if you have a few minutes, you can get to your safe.

Back up important files. Smernoff recommends adopting the U.S. special forces philosophy of “two is one, one is none” when it comes to redundancies. Use three backups: Paper copies in a safe or safe deposit box, encrypted thumb drives (one each in the safe, a safe-deposit box, and your go bag), and encrypted files in a cloud service like iCloud or Google Drive.

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